When I was in high school, I wrote a brief essay on how I felt about the Columbine killings. (Those had taken place years earlier, when I was in middle school.) Essentially, my feelings were that, while the two gunmen were solely responsible for their detestable deed, they had been failed by the society around them, a society that did not recognize their considerable intelligence and skill (instead, condemning them for being reserved or different), a society that did not venture to teach them how to use that skill for means other than senseless brutality. A plot like that, a massacre in your own school, causing thirteen deaths before you’re finished, sounded like it would take a lot of skill, anyway. I was also going from this:

Prognosis: Good. Eric is a very bright young man who is likely to succeed in life. He is intelligent enough to achieve lofty goals as long as he stays on task and remains motivated.

That’s from the police report explaining why Columbine killer Eric Harris was released early from juvenile detention (found here). I figured that adults had failed to engage with the killers’ creativity and ingenuity, failing to give them outlets other than violent aggression. (I noted that Doom did not have to be a culprit, here; it could be part of that outlet, with its level editor encouraging players’ creativity.) I asked about the abusive jock culture that the kids were raised in and were clearly rebelling against. I also used, as a framing device, an old Superman story where the hero laments the wasted talent of the young hooligans who attack him, and the slum environment that he was convinced contributed to their poor development. I thought that worked well.

The trouble is, I went to research my story to see if it held up, and it didn’t. (Well, one part did: the killers’ Doom levels were pretty ordinary, and nothing to write home about.) The kids had comfortable, upper-class lives. The shootings were random, senseless, with no clear target; they chose, when their plans went awry, to make their last stand in the library, when surely the gym or locker room would have been a better place to target football players or other high-school social elites. The killers’ diaries did include hateful diatribes against various religious and ethnic minorities–the killers were, after all, full of hate–but also against white people, against wrestling, against country music, against the WB television network. The killers never said “all jocks stand up,” nor did they ever slay a woman for affirming her faith in God (both are apocryphal and discredited). The killers were not social outcasts; they weren’t the most popular kids in school, but they were well-known and had many friends. Most of all, the rampage was not an ingenious plot; it was actually an abysmal failure, as pipe bombs around the school failed to go off, and the killers were forced to scale back their massacre to a “mere” thirteen murders, ending at the school’s library. There was no clear motive, no rhyme or reason, no sign of intelligence or ingenuity. The killers merely had many screws loose. They were insane, an unsatisfyingly arbitrary conclusion.

This disturbed me deeply, when I got to unraveling the problem. The legend has it that the killers were abused and bullied until they snapped, that the school’s jocks and preps had pushed them to the breaking point by not accepting them in the school’s social fabric. The legend was untrue, and I had grown accustomed to believing it. What I was realizing was that, in developing the legend, people–including me–were projecting onto the Columbine killers. (In my case, this was helped along by the witchhunt that followed, where teachers, now wary of “edge” cases, proceeded to isolate students who seemed “different”–students, possibly, like me–though isolation sounds as though it would exacerbate the problem of actual high-risk cases.)

What does this mean for us? What pieces of our identity are we mapping onto high-school mass murderers? What pieces of us–including me–admired these lowlifes? What made us think of them, privately, as antiheroes, bad-boy Guy Fawkeses standing up for what we believe in using methods we don’t, while publicly condemning them as rank thugs and cowards?

You may say I am merely projecting my own feelings, presuming that, because I was horrified to find I was contributing to a legend of projecting ourselves onto the Columbine killers, others must have been doing the same. That is possible. Discuss.

I will admit that, in middle school, I did have violent fantasies. They scared me, as I am not a violent person (I’m a Quaker!) and strongly believe that violence in such situations fails to solve anything, that violence is, in almost every instance, merely an excuse for one to feel powerful. I would never want to be in that situation or deal with the consequences of killing my friends, teachers, classmates, people I love and care about even if they treat me poorly; this dislike is probably related to why these murder sprees typically end with suicides. Twisting your mind into believing that your tormentors deserve death is difficult. Twisting your mind into believing that you can then stand by that decision and face the consequences is downright impossible. (Willingness to stand by your decision and accept the consequences, incidentally, is a good test for whether or not you’re sincere about breaking what you consider to be an unjust rule or law. Something inherently immoral, like murder, is something nobody wants to accept the consequences for.)

Middle school was a fairly special situation for me, and you might read about it, someday, perhaps in my memoirs. But over time, the violent thoughts, the fantasies, subsided, and to this day if I’m ever upset over bad treatment over a long period of time, I tend to fantasize more about cussing someone out or finally saying how I really feel (I imagine this is common), something else that is difficult to accept the consequences for. Shooting someone with a gun seems innately distasteful to me, and the main reason that I stay away from hyper-violent games is not because I think they will somehow “make” me a killer (give human beings credit: we’re not nearly that malleable), but because I do not want to become desensitized to violence, the way most of the world seems to be. I’m not offended by the oft-repeated fact that, in Grand Theft Auto, you can kill prostitutes; the game allows you to kill anyone, and the open world is the game’s trademark. I’m more offended by the fact that, the one time I played Grand Theft Auto III (determined to be a “good” mobster–I enjoy power fantasies where I get to be good–and vowing only to kill those whose deaths are required for the mission), it is downright impossible to drive down the street without running people over and hearing their spines crunch beneath your tires. Why isn’t that brought up as a social failing of the game? How is it an “open world” when I can’t not kill people?

I digress. Newsweek is running a feature (which I found through GamePolitics) on the “anatomy of violence,” focusing on a psychoanalysis of Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech killer. The old drumbeat starts up again, as social isolation, American opportunism, and abuse growing up are trotted out as ingredients in the making of a mass murderer. I would presume that these killers serve as a sort of mirror, ways for us to talk about the demons inside of us while exculpating ourselves by projecting them onto murderers. It’s a useful technique, to be sure, but it needs to end. We should confront our inner romanticization of young killers (at least, if I’m right about all this), because a front like that covers deep-seated issues underneath, human issues that we all have, issues that keep us from connecting with each other and living full lives.

Back when I was in middle school, and Columbine had led to an increase in reporting on school violence (and to a myth that youth crime was on the rise), I remember when I learned of a new school shooter. This one was different… she was a girl, she was quiet, she was well-spoken, she idolized people like Martin Luther King, Jr. She didn’t fit anyone’s profile of a shooter, someone keeping the anger bottled up until she blows. (I can’t find this story on a Google News archive search, so I may have remembered it wrong.)

I remember reading that and thinking, finally, a school shooter that I can identify with! That stopped me cold. What was I thinking? Do I really think school shooters can represent me, that I can be his or her constituent? That chilled me for a long time, and led to a lot of this later introspection.

One last thing. While looking up the links for this post, I found this, explaining why the juvenile-detention authorities didn’t consider the Columbine killers to be a recidivism risk:

The situation with Harris and Klebold was an anomaly, Russel said. “These kids didn’t meet the criteria for troubled teens. They came from affluent neighborhoods, two-parent households, jobs, and no serious drug or alcohol problems. They were able to conceal what was going on inside them.”

Huh.

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Sometimes, Tina, it just seems like the whole world’s messed up… and that there’s not much we can do to keep it from affecting us. I just hope one day I can find unconditional forgiveness in my own heart for the bullies I used to have to face every day.

I have recently started reading your blogs. You write very well and this was an excellent read. Lots of thoughts but too tired to offer any coherent thoughts.

May I offer a quote by Desmond Tutu:
(And it is not about the operating system ;))
A person with ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of
others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed.

If it helps, a while ago, I talked to a boy that used to bully me in elementary school. As it turned out, he had been bullied himself, much harsher than me, and was merely passing it on… it was strange.

He wasn’t doing well, when I spoke to him. Someone pointed out what I should be proud of… that I endured his bullying and went to make something of myself. There’s something of a virtue just in enduring the bullying and being a good person nonetheless. Bullies may rule the playground, but as we get older, they wither and fall ’cause we all depend on each other and bullies just limit their own options. That brings me to (tonight’s worrrd! ch-shink!) the next comment:

Joanna: Thanks! Yeah, that’s what appeals to me about the philosophy of ubuntu. It’s amazing how much I owe other people. It takes a bit off my shoulders not to be too egotistical, to let go and remember that I’m part of something much, much bigger. It improves my digestion and my worldview 🙂

The most horrible part of the constant verbal abuse I got from father and brother was that it was imprinted on me. It took a few years of Adult Children of Alcoholics to understand my behavior and to reprogram. While the imprinting was on a subconscious level, Consciously as a kid, I read lots of good books that promoted good values and courage so all my conscious decisions were very healthy. But there was at times that subconscious streak of criticism and cynicism. In high school, a girl I admired very much pointed out that I was very cynical. When I asked what “cynical” meant, she told me to look it up which I did. That was the start on my journey to self awareness.

I just laid bare the black pit in my soul to you all.

In public, my Joanna persona is the antithesis of all that was bad when I was younger. Joanna is self confident, smiles and makes eye contact with everyone, hugs and dancing when asked (except for the few feely creeps). One big fantasy would to go out to a busy street corner and hand out flowers and hugs to everyone …

When I was a freshman and sophomore in high school, there was a girl named Jewel – one of those tough tomboys who played on all the sports teams – and her friend, Monica (same sort), who bullied me constantly – which gave the guy bullies even more ammunition, getting beat up by a girl. I hated Jewel.

Then during my junior year, all hell broke loose when it turned out that Jewel had developed a crush on one of her female track team members – and was resolutely rejected and the rumors spread. Popular Jewel found herself completely dismissed and ignored by everybody. Everybody, that is, except for me.

I walked up to her one day where she was sitting in her now usual alone fashion. And we talked. And she turned out to be really nice. And my heart kinda melted.

So who knows? It’s too bad that it took Jewel’s being ostracized for her to suddenly grow a little compassion. But perhaps it was really there all along beneath the bully.

I look back on school and we were all embryo adults. We were for the most part, the products of how we watched our parents behave. Only now am I starting to put all the pieces of High School together as I watch the behavior of other adults.

The bully in Jewel was probably her parents. I hope she was able to shed their influence.

In my seemly peaceful little wildflower gardens, the plants fight each other for sunlight by various means. Some spread out to block the light from smaller plants under them. Others quickly grow up high, tall and narrow to pierce through those below and then block the light.

The trees in my ancient little forest have a pecking order that takes decades to act out. The massive fast growing Poplar trees finally came down in the last storm so now the Oaks and Maples will have more sunlight. No more Poplars will grow under the canopy of the Oaks and Maples.

This house came with a bird feeder that was just a 30 in wide pan mounted on a post. Lots of room for lots of seed. Lots of room for all the birds to have a great time feasting together. Wrong! Only one bird at a time. The pecking order thing. It made me depressed to watch the “bully” or alpha chase the others off the feeder. I finally took it down as I got depressed watching the fights while drinking my morning coffee.

That is the process of life …if not we would still be simple self replicating molecules without any awareness or ability to interact with the cosmos.

Human compassion and true democracy is an aberration in the Universe in that it allows a life to live and develop without the threat of the brute. To develop something greater beyond the raw emotional instincts of our evolution.

In this light I see that Humanity has great and wonderful potential to do wonderful things in the Universe if we can just get over the unthinking brute factor.

…… Ummm, I didn’t expect all that to come out…. But I have a lot of time up here in the mountains to ponder these things. I guess I need to get out more.

Yeah, the funny thing is that the bully who picked on me, I always took it in stride. I found him a little… erudite. So I shrugged it off when he picked on me, because he kind of amused me.

Once, at the end of the year, he hauled off and punched me in the stomach. I was short of breath… later, he felt terrible and apologized. This may have been simply because he knew the teachers were after him, but I had faith. The teachers asked me how I thought he should be punished, and I asked for them to forgive him, since he had apologized and I felt better. I feel like I really made the right choice… I felt that way then, because I thought, ha, now he’ll never do it again.

That’s not the same as being a victim, of course. I was happy with myself. I hope I can muster it in me to forgive people for doing worse things, though. I was just pleased that I broke from the “adult” tradition of exacting vengeance for anything and everything, and instead, actually following Jesus’s advice for once. It seemed like a good idea at the time, and I hope I could muster the same good faith today.

Yeah, I think so. Growing up, my dad’s been a Quaker minister of various kinds at different times, so I’ve always had sort of a huffy attitude towards violence, that people just do it to make them feel better but it never really works.